A Theory of Chronic Pain

A social and evolutionary theory of human disease and chronic pain

By Denis G. Rancourt

We like to nurture a species self-image where we are radically different from ants and bees. The idea goes like this. Ants and bees are automatons completely governed by chemical and physical signals and each individual in the colony has its place which determines its physical body characteristics, adapted to the function of its class.

Adapt and Survive: A Final Warning by James Lovelock

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning

James Lovelock Allen Lane, UK, 2009, ISBN 9781846141850

By Stephan Harding

June 29, 2010 “Resurgence” — It is often said that it takes great ideas in science some forty years to gain widespread acceptance. Sadly for us all, James Lovelock’s concept of a self-regulating Earth has fitted this mould with a frustrating and yet thoroughly predictable punctuality: had acceptance come sooner we would by now have been much further advanced in our understanding of the dangers of climate change.

It was in 1965, whilst thinking of a workable life-detection experiment for a NASA mission to Mars, that Lovelock received a “flash of enlightenment” which would lead him to overturn a notion widely held by scientists at the time: that living beings are merely passive passengers on an Earth governed mostly by geological, chemical and physical processes. Not so, said Lovelock – life’s tightly coupled feedbacks with the abiotic domains of atmosphere, rocks and water configure the Earth into a dynamic, evolving planet that has actively maintained its surface in a state suitable for life over thousands of millions of years despite the vagaries of plate tectonics and an ever-brightening sun.